Saturday, May 20, 2017

Xenophilia, Fake Sovereignty and Nigeria’s Slavish Politicians

Sometime in 2012 at the height
of Goodluck Jonathan’s unnerving incompetence amid rising Boko Haram insurgency,
I made a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Nigeria’s governance should be privatized.
I got a swift pushback from a motley crowd of humorless, dewy-eyed “nationalists”
who thought I was advocating the recolonization of Nigeria.

But does anyone
seriously believe Nigeria isn’t still a colony, that Nigeria is independent,
and that its leaders cherish national sovereignty? Look at our current
president. He is an unapologetic Anglophile. When he won election in 2015, the
first place he flew to was England. It’s also where all his children went to
school. It’s where he goes to treat even his littlest ailment “since 1978 when
I was in Petroleum,” according to a transcript of his interaction with
Nigerians in London, as reported by the Punch of February 6, 2016.

The Amerophilia of the
late Umar Musa Yar’adua and Goodluck Jonathan were no less cringe-worthy. When
Yar’adua was elected president, he visited America and told George Bush his
visit to the White House was “a rare opportunity” and a “moment that I will never forget in my life.” I
know of no elected president of a sovereign country who ever said that to
another elected president.

When Jonathan was made
acting president in 2010, he sought a stamp of legitimacy for his acting
presidency by visiting America. He also gave more weight to the empty diplomatic
compliments of Obama than he did to the genuine feelings of the people he
governed. The Vanguard of September
26, 2011, for instance, reported him as saying “I just got back from the US.
The President of America is like the president of the world because it is the
most powerful country…. Obama, when he spoke, commended Nigeria but back home
we are being abused.”

As I pointed out in my
March 23, 2013 article titled, “State Pardon: 5 Reasons Jonathan Can’t Appeal to Sovereignty,” “all
post-independence Nigerian governments, with the exception of the late General
Murtala Muhammed military regime, actively and slavishly seek the approval of
Washington almost as a state policy.”

I explored this
unsettling xenophilia (irrational, unjustified, inferiority-driven love for the
foreign) in my September 24, 2011 column titled “What the WikiLeaks Controversy Says about Nigeria’s Leaky-mouthed Elite.” I pointed
out that most Nigerians would seem to be held hostage by a debilitating and
deep-seated inferiority complex. This complex consists in the
internationalization of a mentality of low self-worth and an inordinate
reverence of the foreign, especially if the “foreign” also happens to be white.

It is this xenophilic
inferiority complex that allowed low-grade US diplomatic officers to extract
treasure troves of sensitive national secrets almost effortlessly from
well-placed Nigerian officials, according to revelations from WikiLeaks.

What I’ve found
particularly instructive from the US diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks squealed
in 2011 is that our perpetually lying politicians suddenly become truthful, honest,
and straight-talking people when they talk to Americans. You would think they
were standing before their Creator—or at least before a stern, omniscient,
no-nonsense dad who severely punishes his kids for the minutest lie they tell.

For instance, Nuhu
Ribadu who had told the world that he thoroughly investigated former President
Obasanjo and found him squeaky clean confessed to the Americans that Obasanjo
was, indeed, more corrupt than Abacha who, in Nigeria’s popular discourse, has
become the byword for obscene corruption.

The same Ribadu had lied
that the EFCC he headed never investigated Mrs. Patience Jonathan over
money-laundering allegations. But leaked US diplomatic cables confirmed that he
did.

Nasir el-Rufai had also
publicly denied any debt to Atiku Abubakar for his political rise, but he
confessed to American embassy officials that Atiku indeed gave him his first
public service job as head of the Bureau of Public Enterprises.

Many Nigerian leaders
seem to have an infantile thirst for a paternal dictatorship. The United States
is that all-knowing, all-sufficient father-figure to whom they run when they
have troubles. We learned from the US embassy cables that our Supreme Court
judges, Central Bank governors, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, and
governors routinely ran to the American embassy like terrified little kids when
they had quarrels with each other.

In the past, many people
had been falsely accused of being “CIA agents.” For instance, Dr. Patrick
Wilmont, the brilliant sociologist who taught at Ahmadu Bello University for
many years, was deported to England under the pretext that he was a CIA agent.
Many other innocent people, Nigerians and non-Nigerians alike, have been
falsely labeled “CIA agents.”

Now we know that it is our leaders, who are
embedded in the inner recesses of our national power structure, that are the
real “CIA agents.” The American government doesn’t need to invest a lot of
money planting agents in Nigeria when they can—and do—get any information they
want first-hand and untainted from our very leaders.

Our elites’ egos are often
flattered to no end when a white person—any white person—considers them
“worthy” enough to serve as traitorous snitches against their own country.

When I worked in the
presidential villa during Obasanjo’s administration, people used to joke that
the surest way to attract the president’s attention was to bring a white person
to his office.

I once read the
experiences of German expatriate workers in Nigeria who said they made a
boatload of money from Nigerian governors who paid them to appear with them in
public as “foreign investors.” They said all they did was to pretend to sign
documents, shake hands, and take pictures with governors and commissioners.

But it isn’t only our
political leaders who are afflicted by this psychiatric malaise. A friend here
in the United States once told me the story of a rich Nigerian woman who came
to Houston in the state of Texas to treat a medical condition. It turned out
that the best doctor for her condition was a Nigerian-born medical doctor.

But the woman, to the shock of American
doctors who referred her to the Nigerian doctor, said she would never submit to
being treated by a Nigeria. “How can I spend millions of naira to come to America
only to be treated by a Nigerian? No way! I might as well have stayed in
Nigeria. No, I want a white man to treat me,” my friend quoted her as saying.

Long story short, the
Nigerian doctor recommended the treatment regimen to be given to the woman and
handed it to a white doctor who administered it to her.

Do you see any parallels
between this woman and our president who goes to London even for an “ear
infection” that can be treated in Nigeria and the President’s Chief of Staff
who rushes to London even for “breathing problems”? And we claim we are a sovereign
nation? Give me a break!

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust).

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.